Teaching Comparative

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Interactive version of Bloom's Taxonomy

Ken Halla posted this on his blog, but it's certainly worth repeating. I was introduced to Bloom's Taxonomy in a teaching methods class. For the next 35 years, I used it regularly to create learning activities, assignments, and test questions. Once in awhile, I still pick up my ancient copy for advice. Things have been updated to help you figure out more "modern" activities. Check it out.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Living on borrowed money

The Chinese people have one of the world's highest savings rates. Where do all those savings go? A lot get loaned to the US (buying government bonds). But a lot more of those savings are borrowed (selling bonds) by government at various levels.

It turns out that China might have debt problems like those in Greece and Portugal.

Official UK migration figures are "little better than a best guess", an influential group of MPs has said.

The Public Administration Committee said the statistics were "not fit for purpose" and did not accurately assess how many non-UK residents were entering and leaving the country.

The MPs recommended finding new ways to gather migration information.

But immigration minister Mark Harper defended the statistics as "accurate" and "very robust"…

Government van meant to fight off UKIP political slogans

In the year to June 2012, immigration was estimated at 515,000 while emigration was estimated at 352,000, putting net migration - the difference between the number of people entering and leaving the country - at 163,000…

But the MPs warned that current net migration statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Home Office were "blunt instruments" and were "not adequate for understanding the scale and complexity of modern migration flows"…

Friday, July 26, 2013

Recreating Putin

Somehow, back in June, I missed this. Luckily, Kevin James who teaches in California didn't and posted a link to it in his blog, AHS Comparative Government. In case you missed both the original and Kevin's referral, here's a repeat.

Oh, poor Putin, he's like the ringmaster without a permanent circus. He might well wish he had the structures of the old Soviet Union and the Communist Party. Then he wouldn't have to keep creating organizations and structures to prop up his governing.

JUNE 12th is Russia Day, celebrating its emergence from the Soviet Union as a sovereign state…

Putin

Vladimir Putin appeared on a gleaming red podium to staged chants of “People, Russia, Putin”. The occasion was a relaunch of the All Russia Popular Front, a loosely defined movement set up two years ago to assist his return to the presidency and left dormant since then. In a ceremony more like a corporate Christmas party than a political congress, Mr Putin was unanimously declared the movement’s leader. The idea, just days after he announced his divorce, is to confirm a union between Mr Putin and Russia. But smiles were forced and the national hymn at the end seemed out of tune.

An attempt to reanimate the Popular Front into a genuine political force is in part a result of the declining utility of the ruling United Russia party as a support base for Mr Putin. Labelled the “party of crooks and thieves” by… the opposition, United Russia has become a problem for Mr Putin ever since the December 2011 Duma election when it scored less than 50% despite widespread vote-rigging. Since then its poll rating has fallen to 24%, says the Levada Centre, a pollster.

Igor Malashenko, a former head of the NTV television channel and adviser to Boris Yeltsin, argues that the relaunch of the Popular Front also chimes with moves towards a more personalised rule of the Franco kind, in which a leader appeals directly to the people, sidelining the elite which he deems corrupt and unreliable…

More broadly, the promotion of the Popular Front stems partly from Mr Putin’s need to boost his own legitimacy. Although he has higher support ratings than any of his opponents, he no longer enjoys the solid majority that would make it easy for him to consolidate absolute power. And as the militaristic tone of the Popular Front suggests, he feels he is now at war with both the liberal urban opposition and the West…

Having lost the support of the urban, educated class, Mr Putin has tried to cement his less educated and more conservative electorate by fanning intolerance and anti-Western sentiment.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Mass line of what?

It's not only words that make observers skeptical about the new "mass line" coming out of the Party HQ in Beijing.

The reporter should note, in reference to his comment about the government leaders' fears of a recurance of the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, that those protests began as expressions of unhappiness with corruption and nepotism within the Communist Party.

We could also add that ruling party corruption was one of the primary reasons for the success of the Communist Party in China after World War II and for the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Even as China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, promises to root out corrupt officials, he has launched a serious crackdown on ordinary citizens who have dared to raise the same subject in public.

At least 16 activists have been arrested or detained since banners were unfurled in Beijing in March and April demanding that officials “publicly disclose assets.” The arrest last week of prominent activist Xu Zhiyong heightened the sense of despair among leading liberals about China’s new leadership and prompted open letters of protest.

The crackdown dramatically illustrates the Chinese leadership’s paranoia about street protests that could snowball. The government seems haunted by memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the Arab Spring and China’s own short-lived 2011 “Jasmine Revolution.”

The arrests also signal that any moves by Xi to punish corruption will be on his and the Communist Party’s terms…

A popular saying in China goes: Failing to fight corruption will kill the country, but battling it would kill the Communist Party…

That viewpoint leads some people to argue that China’s president may be sincere in his battle against corruption but that he is proceeding at his own pace or on his own terms. “I see no reason to write it off as a show designed just to keep the masses distracted while the looting continues,” said Donald Clarke, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, on the ChinaFile Web site. “But it does mean that reform will not involve outside accountability. We’ll handle it ourselves, thank you very much. Sorry, citizens: it’s really none of your business.”…

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Iranian minorities

The textbooks I've read emphasize how politically inconsequential minorities in Iran are. Azeris are well integrated; Kurds are co-opted; religious minority communities are even guaranteed symbolic representation in the majlis. Only one of the texts, in my recollection, mentions the Sunnis, and the authors note that there's not even a Sunni mosque in Tehran.

It started Wednesday morning as a squabble between an unlicensed watermelon vendor and the widely despised urban management agents who prowl China’s streets looking for scofflaws. Words were exchanged, blows were landed and in the end, the vendor, Deng Zhengjia, 56, lay dead on the pavement in Linwu, a city in central Hunan Province, as angry bystanders photographed his body with their cellphones…

Deng Zhengjia's ID badge

Mr. Deng’s death has once again drawn national attention to China’s army of urban management officials, known as chengguan, who occupy an awkward and ill-defined place in the government’s apparatus to maintain stability. More powerful than private security guards but lacking the authority to make arrests or carry weapons, chengguan have for many Chinese become the most visible face of the government’s authoritarian impulses.

Responsible for dealing with sanitation complaints, unlicensed construction and illegal peddling, they often seize goods with impunity, beat those who resist and issue what critics describe as arbitrary fines…

On Friday, hackers took over the Linwu government Web site, inserting the message “What is unjust is doomed to destruction, we will take back our country!”…

The ruling Communist Party’s expansive security system is well equipped to ensure that such episodes do not set off wider unrest. But the popular outrage can only complicate President Xi Jinping’s efforts to reduce the animosity that many Chinese feel toward party functionaries and law enforcement officials…

Known as the “mass line campaign,” it seeks to address extravagance and corruption among party officials and reduce behavior that “divorces the party from the masses,” according to the state news media…

As with previous instances of chengguan violence, in this case the state-run news media have tried to manage public ire by allowing relatively untrammeled coverage of the episode and running commentaries that castigate those involved in the violence, although they stop short of calling for a substantial overhaul of the system. “Condemn Violence, Not Chengguan System,” said a headline in Global Times, a populist tabloid owned by the party-run People’s Daily…

Monday, July 22, 2013

More on Chinese mass urbanization

Dan Hoehler, who teaches in Maryland sent a note to remind me of the continuing series on the ambitious urbanization project going on in some parts of China.

He wrote, "The NYT put together a great set of resources about China’s massive move from farms to cities. There is a good article, a solid video, and a great series of photos. I thought your subscribers might be interested in seeing it."

Indeed, I was interested and you probably will be interested too. You could use this by asking students what the government would have to plan for, what peasants should expect, and how the program would affect people's attitudes toward the government and its leaders.

Once again, reporter Ian Johnson makes reference to the Cultural Revolution in the article. I think references to the Great Leap Forward would be much more relevant.

Li Yongping is directing one of the largest peacetime population transfers in history: the removal of 2.4 million farmers from mountain areas in the central Chinese province of Shaanxi to low-lying towns, many built from scratch on other farmers’ land. The total cost is estimated at $200 billion over 10 years…

It is one of the most drastic displays of a concerted government effort to end the dominance of rural life, which for millenniums has been the keystone of Chinese society and politics. While farmers have been moving to cities for decades, the government now says the rate is too slow…

The effort is run by officials like Mr. Li in Xi’an, who speaks emotionally about wanting to help push China’s 700 million rural residents into the 21st century. Heirs to imperial China’s Mandarin officials, modern-day Communist Party officials like Mr. Li speak knowingly of what is best for China’s 1.3 billion people, where they should live and how they should earn a living…

The problem is jobs, or the lack of them, in these areas… During a visit in February, townspeople sat in their front yards, huddled around open fires. Their homes were brand-new, with indoor heating and modern appliances, just as Mr. Li’s plan envisions, but it all runs on an unaffordable luxury: electricity. Hence the fires to keep warm…

Li Yongping

Underlying the project seems to be a distaste among city dwellers for rural life. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Li lost his chance at a college education because the country’s leader, Mao Zedong, closed schools and sent young people to work in the countryside. Mr. Li said the time helped him understand the plight of peasants, but like many elites in China he also speaks dismissively of rural life.
“They need to shower more often, but how can they shower on a dirt floor?” Mr. Li said of the farmers and their old adobe homes in the mountains. “If you don’t shower a lot, that’s no good. Put simply, we want to teach ordinary Chinese people to bid farewell to several backward ways of living.”

Friday, July 19, 2013

Paying the bills here at College City Publications

Once in a great while an advertisement shows up as the main blog post.

The original version of the Teaching Tools contains 50 tools which ask students the same questions about each of the six countries in the Advanced Placement course. The purpose is to encourage comparative thinking.

The Teaching Tools package includes 14 FRQ questions for practice. There are rubrics for the tools and the FRQs as well as teaching ideas. As a bonus there's a chart illustrating which sections of the course outline and which of the tools are aligned with the chapters in 8 major comparative textbooks.

The new version is labeled v2.0. The 50 tools ask students questions that focus on the unique aspects of each political system. That gets at comparative thinking from a different angle.

There are 17 practice FRQs, rubrics, and teaching ideas. The correlation chart is included.

FEW political parties are as cunning at forging alliances of convenience as Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)…

[W]hen thrown into opposition from 2000-12, the PRI resolutely blocked calls for co-operation. Its obstinacy helped to frustrate the presidency of Felipe Calderón… Why, then, have Mexico’s opposition parties obediently tagged along with the PRI in a new alliance, known as the “Pact for Mexico”, which is allowing Mr Peña to race through his legislative agenda?

The pact… secures cross-party backing for a package of long-overdue reforms. It has already made possible an overhaul of education and a law to tackle monopolies in telephony and broadcasting. But the alliance is under strain. In the run-up to local elections held in almost half the states on July 7th, the PAN and the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) threatened to pull out of the pact, demanding that the government stop local PRI bosses from using electoral dirty tricks…

[N]either opposition party appears ready to renege on the pact just yet. The PAN says that its careful dealing with the PRI in the 1990s helped to earn it the public support necessary to win the presidency in 2000… Like the PAN, [the PRD] hopes to use the alliance to negotiate political reforms that would weaken the PRI in some of its regional strongholds…

The drug-related violence that has racked Mexico in recent years provides [another] reason for politicians to pull together. “This pact is truly something of great merit,” says Mr Krauze. “For the first time in our history the parties are learning to work together in a democratic context.” Yet there is also something familiar about the deal: its principal beneficiary, as so often before, is the wily PRI.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

All smoke and no fire

ON JULY 9th the Communist Party issued a new directive on President Xi Jinping’s campaign to clean up its act. Among the orders: “Avoid going through the motions”. Despite a blizzard of instructions in recent weeks calling on officials to get “closer to the masses”, the response has been perfunctory…

The campaign “to study the mass line” revives a Maoist notion that the party should learn from the people (while ignoring any demands for a different party to lead them)…

Mass line study session

Party committees around the country, well-rehearsed in such campaigns, have been going through the drill, organising “study sessions” for party members…

But the stricture to “avoid going through the motions” is an acknowledgment that such campaigns have become ritualised. When Mr Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, launched a campaign a few years ago to promote “the advanced nature” of the party, some officials avoided having to write essays on the topic by downloading boilerplate ones from the internet. Similar materials are beginning to circulate again…

On July 9th, however, Study Times, an official newspaper under the Central Party School, questioned whether the “mass line” campaign would prove effective. In a remarkable deviation from Mr Xi’s conservative rhetoric, the article implied that the campaign was an outdated concept. Better, it argued, to have a bit more democracy.

Experts said the "mass line" education campaign recently launched by the Communist Party of China (CPC) will not be a short-term movement, but a long-term effort to strengthen ties between the Party and the people…

Symbols of an old mass line

"Mass line" refers to a guideline under which CPC officials and members are required to prioritize the interests of the people and persist in exercising power for them…

The CPC has initiated multiple movements throughout its history in order to aid in the implementation of new policies.

However, such methodology has been seen as old-fashioned and not compatible with contemporary society. In addition, such movements typically lasted for only a limited time, resulting in some problems re-emerging after the movements concluded.

The CPC is facing a more complicated situation in maintaining ties with the public, as rapid economic and social development has resulted in conflicts between different social groups.

"Therefore, the CPC needs to build systems and mechanisms to encourage its members to interact with the public and guarantee its mass line principle," Gao Xinmin, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said…

It’s finally official: Nearly a week after elections for governor in Baja California, the candidate for the conservative party that has ruled the state for a generation was declared the victor.

Francisco Vega of the National Action Party (PAN) narrowly defeated Fernando Castro Trenti of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The difference was fewer than 25,000 votes, a margin of slightly less than 3%.

The vote count, abruptly halted on election night, July 7, was completed over the weekend, and the PRI recognized its loss.

It had been critical to the PAN to hold on to Baja, where in 1989 it became the first political party ever to defeat the PRI by winning the governorship, a post it has held since…

For the PAN, keeping the top political job in Baja was also seen as important for the party’s continued cooperation with Peña Nieto’s government and its agenda of economic reforms, including a major overhaul of the giant state oil monopoly.

PRI fights back (fairly?)

Both sides claimed victory Monday in the election for governor of the key Mexican border state of Baja California and authorities said mistakes had been made in preliminary vote counts…

Baja California (in brown)

Preliminary results from the Baja race with about 96 percent of the vote counted showed Francisco "Kiko" Vega of the conservative National Action Party with a nearly 3 percentage point lead, suggesting his coalition might be able to hold onto the governorship his party first won 24 years ago, the first recognized opposition victory in Mexico's modern history.

But the state electoral council announced early Monday that mistakes had been made in the preliminary vote counts…

Vega, who ran in a coalition with the Democratic Revolution Party, claimed victory.

But so did Fernando Castro Trenti of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party…

National Action said a series of dirty tricks in Baja and other state races marked a return to old strong-arm tactics that helped the PRI hold power for seven decades.

Party leader Gustavo Madero had been cooperating with the PRI and President Enrique Pena Nieto to enact key national reforms in public education and telecom laws, and on upcoming energy and tax reform. But he suggested that could be at an end.

In the local races, the PRI appeared to be winning the mayorship of the border city of Tijuana, while National Action was ahead in Mexicali, the Baja California state capital. Further east along the border, National Action was ahead in the cities of Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

To the south, National Action led in the colonial city of Oaxaca, while the PRI claimed to have won the mayorship of the resort city of Cancun…

Monday, July 08, 2013

Separation of church and state

A government donation of land to the Roman Catholic church to build a chapel in the Mexican resort city of Cancun is drawing fire in a country sensitive to religious favoritism.

Local officials in other Mexican cities have drawn fire recently for publicly "dedicating" their cities to Jesus Christ and God at religious events, despite the country's long history of religious conflicts, including the 1920s Cristero war in which tens of thousands died.

But the Cancun donation especially angered some residents because the government-owned land was designated for public use…

Mexican law says the government should be non-religious and not show any preference for any one faith…

[R]eligion is [a] sensitive theme: Mexico was dominated economically, spiritually and intellectually for centuries by the Catholic church. After the 1910-1917 revolution, strict anti-clerical laws were passed that sparked a 1926-1929 uprising by militant Catholics known as the Cristero War.

While the restrictions were eased in the 1990s, many Mexicans - even those who are nominally Catholic themselves - are wary of any church involvement in politics or public affairs…

The reinforcement of the "mass line" has demonstrated the determination of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to correct any misbehavior that may get in the way of its development.

The "mass line," a guideline introduced by the revolutionary forerunners of the CPC, champions close Party-people relations that helped the Party come to the national power.

The CPC followed the line and grew stronger by aligning with the public during the the Agrarian Revolutionary War (1927-1937), the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945) and the War of Liberation (1945-1949).

The line's significance was brought up again decades after its introduction. Top CPC leaders decided in April to launch a year-long "mass line" campaign from the second half of this year to cement Party-people ties…

Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, said in June that the campaign will be a "thorough cleanup" of undesirable work styles such as formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance among officials.

The campaign came on the heels of an "eight-point" regulation that the CPC leadership began promoting in December 2012 to ban extravagance and formalism from events attended by officials.

Both the "eight-point" instruction and the "mass line" campaign are the CPC leadership's endeavor to shoot persistent problems such as red tape, corruption and Party-people alienation among officials…

Unlike their revolutionary forerunners, however, the current CPC leadership will find that the situation for the Party to implement the "mass line" is different from that of decades ago.

It is the temptation of power abuse and huge bribes that the current CPC officials must fight against this time rather than enemy soldiers their revolutionary forerunners had to eliminate decades ago.

After six decades in power, the CPC has elevated China to its place as the world's second-largest economy. The country's growing prosperity has provided Party officials with opportunities to corruption…

Meanwhile, interests and values of the Chinese people are increasingly diversified. They have become more vocal about their legitimate rights and interests, particularly on the Internet.

Under such circumstances, officials must efficiently address people's complaints and tackle their problems to guarantee stability and protect the public's interests…

Monday, July 01, 2013

Talk amongst yourselves

Well, get your students to talk to each other as they evaluate Thomas Friedman's analysis of the state of democracy in the 21st century. He's discussing illiberal democracies, transitions to post-industrial economies, and the roles of social media.

It might be interesting to have students discuss these ideas as an introductory lesson. (Take notes.) And then have them evaluate the ideas again at the end of the course. (Compare discussions.)

Why are we seeing so many popular street revolts in democracies?… Former C.I.A. analyst Paul R. Pillar… asks: “The governments being protested against were freely and democratically elected. With the ballot box available, why should there be recourse to the street?”

It is an important question, and the answer, I believe, is the convergence of three phenomena. The first is the rise and proliferation of illiberal “majoritarian” democracies…

Istanbul protest

What the protesters in Turkey, Russia and Egypt all have in common is a powerful sense of “theft,” a sense that the people who got elected are stealing something more than money: the people’s voice and right to participate in governance…

A second factor is the way middle-class workers are being squeezed between a shrinking welfare state and a much more demanding job market. For so many years, workers were told that if you just work hard and play by the rules you’ll be in the middle class. That is just not true anymore…

Finally, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook and blogging, aggrieved individuals now have much more power to engage in, and require their leaders to engage in, two-way conversations — and they have much greater ability to link up with others who share their views to hold flash protests…

The net result is this: Autocracy is less sustainable than ever. Democracies are more prevalent than ever — but they will also be more volatile than ever…